The present invention relates to a safety device for the occupants of a motor vehicle, and more particularly, to an air bag on the driver side and on the passenger side.
It is already known in connection with motor vehicles to accommodate air bags folded in front of a vehicle driver and a front-seat passenger on the vehicle passenger compartment. In the event of an accident, the air bag is filled with gas and inflated in front of the vehicle occupant. The inflated bag safeguards the occupant against a collision with hard front interior parts and thereby protects him or her from injury. It is also known to secure the air bag located on the driver side in a steering-wheel pot and the air bag located on the front-seat passenger side in a container in the dashboard. The air bag located on the front-seat passenger side has a filling volume many times larger than that of the air bag located on the driver side, so that the larger gap between the dashboard and the front-seat passenger can be filled correspondingly.
If a front-seat passenger has not fastened his or her safety belt, however, then he or she could slip off along the large-surface air bag casing if the seat belt has not been fastened as a result of a transverse momentum and go between the two air bags, especially if the vehicle collides obliquely with an obstacle. As a result, there would no longer be any protection for the vehicle occupant against collision.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,265,468 describes a collision-protection device with two protective cushions for three occupants on the front seats of a motor vehicle. In this arrangement, the two cushions overlap one another slightly in the wall regions pointing towards one another, but there is no provision to ensure that they bear on one another in a predetermined way in order to prevent an occupant from slipping through between the protective cushions.
An object of the present invention is to increase the occupant protection, especially of a motor-vehicle occupant not strapped in, against collision with front interior parts as a result of the interaction of an air bag located on the driver side with an air bag located on the front-seat passenger side.
The foregoing object has been achieved by overlapping two air bags in the middle region of the vehicle so as, when seen looking down into the vehicle from above, each bag has a mutual bearing face forming an angle with the longitudinal axis of the vehicle.
Because the two air bags lying against one another overlap in a predetermined or deliberate manner, the transition between the two air bags in the middle region of the vehicle also affords much better protection against collision with the dashboard by a vehicle occupant who, for example, if he is sitting on a back-seat bench of the motor vehicle without being strapped in, is in danger of being thrown forwards through between the front vehicle seats in the event of a collision.
Because the bearing faces are angled (as seen in a top plan view), the two air bags can unfold completely and at the appropriate time, since they do not impede one another. As a result of the mutual bearing of the two air bag faces in the inflated state, it is now also possible for the bags to assist one another in their supporting effect against forces acting at an angle to the alignment of the bearing faces. This mutual support affords an effective opportunity to choose a surface design and/or material of the bearing faces which creates a certain adhesion between the two bags and prevents or makes more difficult a relative movement of the bearing faces of the bags.
When the air bag located on the driver side is arranged in the steering-wheel pot and the air bag located on the front-seat passenger side is arranged in the dashboard (for which reason the dashboard air bag necessarily has a much larger filling volume and in comparison with the steering wheel pot air bag unfolds somewhat more slowly), the overlap slant of the bearing faces should be aligned in such a way that, as seen in a top plan view, the bearing faces of the two air bags extend rotated in the clockwise direction relative to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle, so that the unfolding of the air bag located on the driver side can take place unimpeded, before the air bag located on the front-seat passenger side comes with its bearing face up against that of the air bag located on the driver side.
These and other features, objects and advantages of the present invention will become more apparent from the following detailed description of a presently preferred embodiment.